The Insureum Protocol uses blockchain to create a decentralized ecosystem that connects insurers, their policyholders, and third parties.
Despite the insurance industry’s success over the last 30 years, it has never been a technology leader. Finally, with the Insuruem Protocol, the insurance value chain will become cost efficient and simple, and create larger value in the insurance industry by enabling transactions between stakeholders. Insurance companies, policyholders and 3rd parties alike can all make transactions according to their own competencies, and all excess value (created from the transactions) is shared based on their contribution.
Zikto started negotiations with insurance and financial institutions in 2015, concerning the gathering and processing of lifecycle data. It was these new connections that led Zikto down the path toward changing their focus as a company.
The Zikto team realized that a lot of players in traditional finance-based sectors have a strong initiative to understand their current and potential customers. A data-gathering intermediary can be a real asset for these sectors to understand their target audiences. With reliable data, they can develop better products that are customized, digitalized and more cost-efficient.
However, it is very difficult and costly for these sectors to gather this data by themselves. It requires a significant investment of time and money to develop and integrate such a system, market it to the public, manage the data gathering processes, and analyze it. The Challenge, Zikto’s data integration platform, bridged the gap nicely by providing data and analysis gathered from various smart devices. Zikto secured a number of sales agreements and ongoing negotiations with global insurance companies, as The Challenge offered a good value-for-price. As just one of millions of app developers, Zikto ultimately decided to side with the win-win monetization strategy of adjusting their focus to the processing and integration of data.
Now, Zikto is expanding the idea of data sharing to another level: developing a protocol to facilitate the transactions. It will promote more stakeholders in the traditional insurance industry, benefiting all. Insurers will find easier ways to gather data, users and policyholders will have access to better insurance products, and third parties like app developers and sales agencies will find optimal ways to monetize their services and products.
The Insureum Protocol is a new blockchain-based insurance ecosystem that seeks to connect insurers, their customers, and developers. It is designed to assist insurance companies in tailoring insurance policies to individual lifestyles to provide unique incentives for customers.
Zikto’s vision is for the Insureum Protocol to create the conditions through which many new insurance products attractive to people under the age of forty are developed.
How can traditional, slow moving insurance companies create new cost-efficient processes and adapt to constantly changing market demand? Decentralization via blockchain technology will give these companies a way to outsource costly manual processes like gathering and analyzing data, and avoid falling behind.Insurance companies are facing drastic changes to the state of the market and its fundamental structure. While other industries adopt and adapt to global digitization trends, the conservative insurance industry is losing ground. Their growth has slowed hand-in-hand with the market due to a rapidly aging population and the changing lifestyles of new generations. Meeting the needs and wants of younger demographics is extremely challenging because of a lack of data and poor capability to deeply analyze it. Globally, a number of insurers are already providing data and digital-driven healthcare services to their policyholders to reduce the cost from claims. For example, the international Medolution programme supported by the National Research Council of Canada▫↗ is based on the idea of using digitization to reduce costs▫↗, while improving patient quality of life. The Canadian Government’s ‘Smart Health’ program▫↗ is similarly based on the idea of reducing costs with digitization.
7Despite the emerging market, there is a global trend of reduced growth in the insurance industry. This is mainly due to stagnancy in advanced markets such as the US and other developed countries including Germany, UK, and Australia, which are expected to see less than 1.5% growth through 2018. The non–life insurance market is forecasted to see a lower growth rate compared to the life insurance market, but the overall trend is almost identical in both markets.As a result of insurance companies’ poor access to data and inability to deeply analyze the data they do have, customers are stuck with limited options from insurance providers who present them with insurance plans which are not 100% suitable for their individual needs.About 30 years ago, the insurance industry experienced an age of innovation. New investment-linked products appealed to a wider range of customers. But since then, the only major innovations in the insurance industry have been the ability to compare plans and shop online. Insurance policies have remained largely the same with entrenched and standardized packages which are not tailored for individual lifestyles. Because of this, insurers are having a hard time attracting buyers in their twenties and thirties, as they do not find insurance offerings attractive. Even those who do consider buying insurance discover that their lifestyles are not well-matched with available insurance plans. These groups may avoid making an insurance purchase and may put off retirement planning as something to look into in another decade. Millennials also find that there is no clear way to subscribe to specific policies they want. For example, a car owner who only commutes less than 5 miles per day would not want to purchase the same insurance policy that their neighbor subscribes to, which covers more than 100 miles of driving per day. The traditional insurance products, by their nature, are not designed to cover different individual needs and wants.
Life insurers, for instance, have until now relied on actual medical data to create the actuarial tables their plans are based on. The problem is that this information is hard to get a hold of, as doctors and medical institutions are rightly reluctant to provide sensitive patient records. The lack of such information is even tougher for smaller companies who want to enter the scene but have no relevant data to rely on when creating their protection plans. For auto and other non-life insurances, there’s a virtually endless stream of user data available online, but very little of it provides insight that is useful to insurers in connection with the creation of new insurance products for a new generation of customers.After insurance policies are created and marketed, they go through a lengthy process known as underwriting before they come into force, where the insurance provider decides whether to issue the insurance policy to the customer. Between underwriting and making a claim, insurance companies, inspectors and customers may waste time and money in making sure that claims are valid and fraud-free.
It is extremely challenging (and expensive) for insurance companies to be agile and create their own platforms to collect necessary data to speed up product creation and underwriting. Especially considering the fact that there are plenty of platforms with almost identical purposes (e.g., mobile applications and websites), acquiring and retaining users on their own platforms is more difficult than it seems to be. Furthermore, policyholders are reluctant to give away their personal information without any incentive.Due to the difficulties stated above, currently, most insurance companies process their value chains manually. Customers are paying high premiums to insurance companies partly due to these poorly-managed value chains. According to reports published by McKinsey & Company, these costs can be reduced by 30% by automating and digitizing the processes. At the same time, there are a lot of services collecting user data but not effectively monetizing it. Many individual app developers use advertising as a monetization strategy, which is renowned to be the least effective, according to a survey by Combo App 13. If they can successfully monetize the acquired data in mutually beneficial way, it will be a game-changer for them.